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Empowering people to be healthier: public health nutrition through the Ottawa Charter

The WHO's Ottawa Charter highlights five priority areas for taking action in public health. Only one of them is at the individual level as action at more upstream intervention levels, such as community or policy levels, is critical for enabling individuals to succeed. The objective of the prese...

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Autor principal: Flynn, Mary A. T.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Cambridge University Press 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4531465/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25602708
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S002966511400161X
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author Flynn, Mary A. T.
author_facet Flynn, Mary A. T.
author_sort Flynn, Mary A. T.
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description The WHO's Ottawa Charter highlights five priority areas for taking action in public health. Only one of them is at the individual level as action at more upstream intervention levels, such as community or policy levels, is critical for enabling individuals to succeed. The objective of the present paper is to give insight into the many complex processes involved in public health nutrition by describing the Ottawa Charter's five priority areas for taking action using public health nutrition initiatives I have been involved in. Evidence-based guidelines for healthy eating and infant feeding provide an essential basis for individuals to ‘develop personal skills’ (Action Area 1). ‘Re-orienting health services’ (Action Area 2) can address the needs of vulnerable population subgroups, such as the culturally sensitive diabetes prevention programme established for an Indo-Asian community in Canada. Identifying geographic areas at high risk of childhood obesity enables better strategic planning and targeting of resources to ‘strengthen community action’ (Action Area 3). Calorie menu labelling can ‘create supportive environments’ (Action Area 4) through encouraging a demand for less energy-dense, healthier food options. ‘Building healthy public policy’ (Action Area 5) to implement mandatory folic acid food fortification for prevention of birth defects has many advantages over a voluntary approach. In conclusion, evaluation and evidence-based decision-making needs to take account of different strategies used to take action in each of these priority areas. For this, the randomised control trial needs adaptation to determine the best practice in public health nutrition where interventions play out in real life with all its confounding factors.
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spelling pubmed-45314652015-08-13 Empowering people to be healthier: public health nutrition through the Ottawa Charter Flynn, Mary A. T. Proc Nutr Soc Conference on ‘Carbohydrates in health: friends or foes’ The WHO's Ottawa Charter highlights five priority areas for taking action in public health. Only one of them is at the individual level as action at more upstream intervention levels, such as community or policy levels, is critical for enabling individuals to succeed. The objective of the present paper is to give insight into the many complex processes involved in public health nutrition by describing the Ottawa Charter's five priority areas for taking action using public health nutrition initiatives I have been involved in. Evidence-based guidelines for healthy eating and infant feeding provide an essential basis for individuals to ‘develop personal skills’ (Action Area 1). ‘Re-orienting health services’ (Action Area 2) can address the needs of vulnerable population subgroups, such as the culturally sensitive diabetes prevention programme established for an Indo-Asian community in Canada. Identifying geographic areas at high risk of childhood obesity enables better strategic planning and targeting of resources to ‘strengthen community action’ (Action Area 3). Calorie menu labelling can ‘create supportive environments’ (Action Area 4) through encouraging a demand for less energy-dense, healthier food options. ‘Building healthy public policy’ (Action Area 5) to implement mandatory folic acid food fortification for prevention of birth defects has many advantages over a voluntary approach. In conclusion, evaluation and evidence-based decision-making needs to take account of different strategies used to take action in each of these priority areas. For this, the randomised control trial needs adaptation to determine the best practice in public health nutrition where interventions play out in real life with all its confounding factors. Cambridge University Press 2015-08 2015-01-20 /pmc/articles/PMC4531465/ /pubmed/25602708 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S002966511400161X Text en © The Author 2015 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Conference on ‘Carbohydrates in health: friends or foes’
Flynn, Mary A. T.
Empowering people to be healthier: public health nutrition through the Ottawa Charter
title Empowering people to be healthier: public health nutrition through the Ottawa Charter
title_full Empowering people to be healthier: public health nutrition through the Ottawa Charter
title_fullStr Empowering people to be healthier: public health nutrition through the Ottawa Charter
title_full_unstemmed Empowering people to be healthier: public health nutrition through the Ottawa Charter
title_short Empowering people to be healthier: public health nutrition through the Ottawa Charter
title_sort empowering people to be healthier: public health nutrition through the ottawa charter
topic Conference on ‘Carbohydrates in health: friends or foes’
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4531465/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25602708
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S002966511400161X
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